The Passion of the Christ – Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics
An examination of religion's role and the ethical dimensions behind top news headlines.Fri, 18 May 2018 16:33:47 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1 Fleming Rutledge on Easterhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2004/04/09/april-9-2004-fleming-rutledge-on-easter/8659/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2004/04/09/april-9-2004-fleming-rutledge-on-easter/8659/#disqus_threadFri, 09 Apr 2004 14:45:14 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=8659Kim Lawton sat down with prominent author and Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge to reflect on the Easter story of crucifixion and resurrection. More →

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, an overwhelming number of Americans — 83 percent — believe that Jesus rose from the dead. This Easter season, Mel Gibson’s controversial movie THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST has provoked unprecedented national conversation about the crucifixion. But some Christian theologians believe those conversations have not gone far enough. Kim Lawton sat down with prominent author and Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge to reflect on crucifixion and resurrection.

KIM LAWTON: The styles and traditions may vary, but on Easter Sunday, all Christians celebrate a central tenet of their faith: that Jesus Christ was crucified and three days later, he rose again. The story may be 2,000 years old, but Christians believe it still has meaning today.

Reverend FLEMING RUTLEDGE: Jesus is alive. There’s never a possibility of the event fading into the mists of the past because this is about a living God who acts and speaks in our own time and will continue to do so.

LAWTON: Over the centuries, the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection has been told, and retold, through art, music, and drama. And public interest hasn’t waned.

(To Rev. Rutledge): What is it about the story that still intrigues us?

Rev. RUTLEDGE: If you’re not a believer, it’s a cultural phenomenon of some sort. It’s related to the history of art and the history of warfare. But if one is a believer, then this is the story that never dies, because this is the story of God’s decisive, once-for-all intervention, on behalf of his creation, to save it.

LAWTON: Fleming Rutledge was one of the first women to be ordained in the U.S. Episcopal Church, and she has been called one of America’s best preachers. A popular Holy Week speaker, she has written widely about crucifixion and resurrection themes. She says visual depictions such as Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST cannot convey the full Easter story.

Rev. RUTLEDGE: The meaning of the cross can’t be found in looking at the beating and the flaying and the nailing. The meaning can only be grasped through very deep engagement with the various portions of Scripture where this is proclaimed. It is the word, the words, the message that brings life.

LAWTON: In Gibson’s depiction, virtually the entire film focuses on the crucifixion and the violence leading up to it; only a few seconds at the end are devoted to the resurrection.

(To Rev. Rutledge): Can the crucifixion be understood apart from the resurrection?

Rev. RUTLEDGE: The crucifixion and the resurrection were a single event. The incredible discrepancy between the horrible obscenity of the crucifixion and the glory of the resurrection is very important. It’s that contrast that gives the story such power. Otherwise it’s just another story about a dying and rising god. There are zillions of those. But this is a story about a historical event that was then reversed.

LAWTON: Differing streams of Christianity have at times placed more emphasis on one over the other. Theologians have criticized many Protestants, and particularly Evangelicals, for jumping too quickly to the happy ending of Easter without first meditating on the grief and horror of Good Friday.

Rev. RUTLEDGE: That is what makes Easter Day what it is. Easter Day was not just a bursting forth of a dead person from the tomb. Easter Day was the overcoming of absolute nihilism, absolute total dehumanization, degradation.

LAWTON: Other Christians may concentrate on the suffering of the crucifixion without remembering the rest of the story. But Fleming Rutledge says the resurrection vindicates the crucifixion.

Rev. RUTLEDGE: No one would be interested in the crucifixion if it weren’t for the resurrection. We wouldn’t even know that there had ever been such a person as Jesus of Nazareth, if he had not been raised from the dead. That is my view. We don’t know the names of any other crucified victims in history. Something happened. Exactly what it was is a matter of dispute, but something tremendous and unpredictable and unforeseen and unprecedented happened. And it was a victory over sin and death.

LAWTON: Rutledge has preached Holy Week sermons for nearly 25 years. She’s keenly aware of the need to come up with something fresh to say every time. But she says she rarely finds herself at a loss.

Rev. RUTLEDGE: One of my deepest convictions is that the Scripture is ever renewing, and that’s one of the aspects of Christianity that not everybody fully understands. Scripture, the Holy Bible — one doesn’t need to be a fundamentalist at all to understand how there is life that flows from it, new, every day. The challenge is communicating it in a fresh way, so that the old story becomes the new story and people begin to be aware of it: “This is my story, too.”

LAWTON: And once again this year, Christians are indeed celebrating that story as their own.

]]>BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: For Western Christians, Lent begins Wednesday — Ash Wednesday. Wednesday is also the day the much-publicized movie, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, opens in theaters across the country. Months of controversy about it have raised the old question, “Who really killed Jesus?” For many, perhaps most Christians, that debate is history, but for Jews, as Kim Lawton reports, it still arouses deep fears of persecution.

KIM LAWTON: It’s the teaching at the core of Christian belief and practice: Jesus suffered, was crucified and buried, but three days later he rose again. For Christians, the cross is an enduring symbol of grace, salvation, and love. But for many non-Christians — and Jews in particular — the cross has long symbolized violence and persecution.

Two thousand years after Jesus’ death, Mel Gibson’s controversial movie, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, has set off a wave of new conversations about who was responsible for Jesus’ death — and why it matters today.

Professor MARY BOYS (Union Theological Seminary, New York): In my business, I would call it a teachable moment. Many people are thinking about the meaning of the death of Jesus, probably in ways they haven’t thought before.

LAWTON: The conversation troubles many Jews, given the long history of Christians persecuting Jews as “Christ-killers.”

Professor Michael Berenbaum, formerly of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, is now with the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. He organized a public forum last week where an interfaith panel discussed the crucifixion. More than 450 people showed up.

Professor MICHAEL BERENBAUM (University of Judaism, Los Angeles): It’s a very complex, very long relationship. And Jews have usually been on the losing end of that relationship.

LAWTON: The crucifixion is described in the first four books of the New Testament, the Gospels. They are called the “Passion narratives” — passion coming from the Latin word for suffering. The Gospels have differing emphases and offer different details.

In piecing together the story, modern scholars also factor in the historical, cultural, and literary context of the Gospels. Many say the role of the Roman occupiers has too often been under-emphasized.

Prof. BOYS: Crucifixion was one of the modes of capital punishment in the Roman Empire. And, in this case, the death penalty, the crucifixion, was used only against marginal people or people who seemed to threaten the order of the state, which apparently Jesus did.

Prof. BERENBAUM: Crucifixion was never a punishment that Jews used as a part of their capital punishment. The rabbis and the Pharisees of that generation could not engage in capital punishment. We didn’t have the political power, even if we had the will.

LAWTON: But the Gospel accounts, to varying degrees, do describe a Jewish role in Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion — a role that has been re-enacted for centuries in Passion plays on stage and in films.

From film THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: If we let him go on in this way, everyone will believe in him. The Roman authorities will take action and destroy our temple and our nation.

LAWTON: In the Gospel accounts, which are read in churches every Holy Week, an assembly of Jewish leaders charges Jesus with blasphemy. The Jewish high priests are portrayed as pushing the reluctant Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to crucify Jesus, while a mob of Jews yells in favor of the crucifixion. For the Jewish community, the story raises sensitive, often painful questions. Are the Gospel Passion stories anti-Semitic? To what extent were Jews involved in the crucifixion?

Professor Shawn Landres, who is Jewish, teaches a class about Christianity to students at the University of Judaism. He says Jews need to remember that the Gospel writers themselves were Jewish and used strong language to convince their divided Jewish community that Jesus was indeed the prophesied Messiah.

Professor SHAWN LANDRES: What do I teach the students about the crucifixion? I teach them that there were Jewish leaders, political leaders, for whom Jesus’ teachings were heretical at best, and politically subversive at worst, and who felt that it would be better for him to be removed from the scene. That doesn’t mean the Jews as a people killed Jesus.

LAWTON: But there’s a complicated history. Perhaps the most provocative account comes in the Gospel of Matthew, when Pilate hesitates in crucifying Jesus. Matthew 27:25 says: “All the people answered, let his blood be on us and on our children.”

Over the course of 1,700 years, Church leaders and individual Christians have assigned a so-called “blood-guilt” blame to the Jews, accusing them of deicide — killing God.

Professor KATHRYN J.S. SMITH (Biblical Studies Department, Azusa Pacific University, California): Those words taken into a new time and place indeed function in an anti-Semitic way, although I am convinced that the Gospel writers and the communities that produced these did not understand it in that way.

Prof. BERENBAUM: One of the traditional anchors of anti-Semitism has been the accusation that Jews are Christ-killers. If we can murder God, murder the son of God, then there is no limit to the evil and iniquity, to the perfidiousness, to use the word that was used in Good Friday liturgy within the Roman Catholic Church — there is no limit to the perfidiousness of the Jews.

LAWTON: Especially during the Easter season, when the Passion story was recounted and re-enacted, the accusation of Christ-killer was used to justify violence against Jews.

Prof. BERENBAUM: With persecutions, with pogroms, with slaughters, with martyrdom, with forced conversions, with expulsion, and ultimately with the Holocaust.

LAWTON: The Roman Catholic Church did not officially repudiate the Christ-killer notion until the 1960s during the Second Vatican Council. Earlier this month, the U.S. Catholic bishops released a new set of documents reaffirming that Jews bear no collective responsibility.

Bishop STEPHEN BLAIRE (Diocese of Stockton): I think it’s very clear in the teaching of the Church that all of us, by our sins, are the ones primarily responsible for the Passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

LAWTON: The evangelical American Tract Society takes a similar view in two new brochures, timed for the release of THE PASSION. They ask, “Who crucified Jesus?”

MARK BROWN (American Tract Society): The answer is, God did it. Ultimately, in the Old Testament, in Isaiah 53, it goes to a verse that says he was smitten and afflicted for our sake. And basically that God laid upon him the iniquity of us all.

LAWTON: Today Christians across the spectrum emphasize the doctrine that it was God’s will that Jesus died to take away the sins of the world. So, because of sin, all of humanity bears responsibility.

That may be a satisfying theological answer, but Professor Smith says it’s also one that can too quickly minimize atrocities against Jews done in the name of Christianity.

Prof. SMITH: There’s not a real grappling with, “This is our tradition. We are heirs of this tradition. What are we going to do with it?”

LAWTON: Much of the interpretation of the Passion story depends on what an individual brings to it. Professor Landres says Christians need to be more aware of the memories of persecution the Passion story evokes among Jews — as well as the fears that persecution could be revived. But he says Jews, too, need to deepen their own understanding.

Prof. LANDRES: I have yet to see a true acknowledgment from some members of the Jewish communal leadership that Christians just don’t read the story the same way Jews do.

LAWTON: Christians and Jews alike hope the new discussion about the crucifixion is an opportunity for dialogue, not more division. They agree the implications of Jesus’ death are vitally important, which is why, 2,000 years later, we’re still talking about it.

]]>JOHN DANCY: This Easter season, the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection is being retold not only in churches but also in pop culture. Kim Lawton takes a look at the enduring interest in the Passion story.

KIM LAWTON: At Easter, perhaps more than at any other time of the year, Christians love to retell the story of Jesus, and especially of his last days on Earth.

Mr. WALT WANGERIN Jr. (Writer in Residence, Valparaiso University): When the story is told, we enter into the story, we become a part of it — and now here’s the important part — and it shapes us. It shapes our spirit, it shapes our capacity for interpreting the universe much more than any kind of intellectual doctrine can shape us.

LAWTON: Author Fulton Oursler called it THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD a story that includes betrayal, abandonment, crucifixion, resurrection, and redemption. People continue to retrace and explore that story, which Christians call the Passion of Christ.

Mr. WANGERIN: It comes from the Latin, which could mean feeling, but goes deeper than that. It generally embraces that feeling which is pain, which is suffering, so that when you say “the Passion of Jesus Christ,” we’re talking about the very specific suffering that Jesus went through.

LAWTON: Over the centuries, the Passion has been retold in numerous ways: through art and through music, such as Haydn’s classic Easter piece, “The Seven Last Words of Christ.”

(Excerpt from “The Seven Last Words of Christ” performance)

LAWTON: In many places around the world, the Passion story is reenacted in villagewide processions and in drama. The most famous Passion play is in Oberammergau, Germany, where the drama has been performed nearly every 10 years since 1633. It will be presented again this year, beginning next month. Working with Jewish leaders, residents have tried to take out anti-Semitic overtones while still being faithful to the original script. Other modern adaptations of the story don’t worry about taking dramatic license.

Here on Broadway, the Ford Center for the Performing Arts has opened a revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical, “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The controversial 1971 rock opera retells the Passion story through the eyes of Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus.

LAWTON: It’s an earthy production that sprinkles modern glitz and technology into the ancient story. Jesus is a confused and often-reluctant hero.

Ms. MARY ANN BRUSSAT (Co-author, SPIRITUAL RX): So this is Jesus as obviously a very charismatic and distinctive person, but the emphasis is also upon Jesus’ humanity. It’s almost, you know, raising the questions of: Do we need somebody who’s a superstar, or do we need someone that we can really grasp to ours — to ourselves.

LAWTON: There are also several new books out about the Passion. Two titles examine it from the perspective of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who washed his hands of Jesus’ condemnation. Walt Wangerin has a new children’s book where the Apostle Peter is the narrator.

Mr. WANGERIN: One of the powers of any living story is that it can be told differently every time and never change the paradox.

LAWTON: This season the most visible retelling may be on the small screen. On Easter Sunday evening, ABC is broadcasting “The Miracle Maker,” a two-hour film with 3-D clay animation and sophisticated computer effects.

(Excerpt from THE MIRACLE MAKER courtesy ABC)

LAWTON: The fairly traditional recounting of the story, seen through the eyes of a young girl who was healed by Jesus.

(Excerpt from MARY, MOTHER OF JESUS courtesy NBC)

LAWTON: The Odyssey Channel is rebroadcasting MARY, MOTHER OF JESUS, a made-for-TV movie that was a big hit for NBC last fall. It tells the story of Jesus from the perspective of his mother, Mary.

(Excerpt from JESUS courtesy CBS)

LAWTON: On May 14th and 17th, CBS presents a four-hour miniseries called JESUS, another fairly traditional account. When it was shown in Italy, the miniseries drew a huge audience, one reason why CBS scheduled it for the May ratings sweeps. Mary Ann Brussat and her husband, Frederic, review books and movies for SPIRITUALITY & HEALTH magazine and other publications.

Mrs. MARY ANN BRUSSAT: To me, it’s very interesting that these particular films would come in our time, particularly with their emphasis upon the miracles, because it — it’s almost in line with the cultural interest in health and healing. This look at Jesus as a miracle worker and — is also consistent with our cultural need for answers, for some — for proof, for signs.

LAWTON: One of her all-time favorites is the 1977 epic, six-hour miniseries JESUS OF NAZARETH a popular video rental. But she says each film has something to add.

Mrs. BRUSSAT: All of the films basically ask, “Who is this man?” And each filmmaker has another take on the answer to that question.

LAWTON: What is it about this story that’s so compelling, even outside the church? Many say the themes of the Passion still resonate.

We’ve all been confused like the disciples or jockeying for power, as they’re doing; for position, as they do. We’ve been afraid of change, like the priests in the temple. We’ve had all of those different roles, and we’ve also witnessed suffering or suffered ourselves.

LAWTON: Some traditional Christians don’t like the pop renditions of the Passion, fearing the religious message may be trivialized or even distorted, all the more reason, Wangerin says, for Christians to continue their own faithful retelling. He says the most important recounting comes inside the church through the sacraments and through the sermon and, especially during Holy Week, through the special observances that allow Christians to experience and reaffirm their faith.

Mr. WANGERIN: The telling of the story collapses time, so that when the 2,000-year-old story is told now, it’s new, now, here, for me, and this Christ has risen. Once and for all, I’m at that cross, I’m at that empty tomb, I recognize the angels who say, “He’s not here. Why are you looking for the living among the dead?”